About

Since March 2014, Clay Johnston has served as the inaugural dean of Dell Medical School and as vice president for medical affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. His vision is to create a new model for academic medicine that accelerates innovation to improve health and reduce inefficiencies in health care. That includes building a vital, inclusive health ecosystem to support new and innovative approaches to education, care, research and community impact — all with a focus on measurably improving health in Austin as a model for the nation. He is also a neurologist, specializing in stroke care and research.

He is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He later received a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a resident in Neurology at UCSF, where he later trained in Vascular Neurology. During his 20 years at UCSF, he rose the academic ranks to professor of Neurology and Epidemiology, and directed the stroke service.

Johnston has authored more than 300 publications in scientific journals and has won several national awards for his research and teaching. In particular, he has published extensively in the prevention and treatment of stroke and transient ischemic attack. He is perhaps best known for his studies describing the short-term risk of stroke in patients with transient ischemic attack and identifying patients at greatest risk, and also for his work related to measuring the impact of research. He has led several large cohort studies of cerebrovascular disease and three international multi-center randomized trials, two of which are ongoing.